Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Friday, August 14, 2015

"Dare we now keep the Swedish flag on our walls without being racist?"

… in the Swedish society … more and more Swedes are afraid to display their own flag

While Americans are (rightly) predicting that a ban against the Confederate flag will eventually lead to a campaign on the Stars and Stripes, Front Page's
Nima Gholam Ali Pour points out that the war has already started in Scandinavia (thanks to Ben Duffy).

In … some 14-year-old boys in a school in Malmö wanted to
pay tribute to the Swedish national soccer team by having shirts with
the Swedish flag on the school photo. The headmaster forbade the
students who wanted shirts with the Swedish flag from being on the
school photo. The headmaster did not want that it would be perceived as
that there is racism in the school.[3]

Ahead of Sweden's national day, June 6, 2014, which is also celebrated
as the official flag day, the extreme left organization the “365
movement”[4],
called on the people to engage in a "flag hunt," which meant that
people would gather Swedish flags on the national day, burn them and
take pictures.[5][6][7]The most flags and the greatest fire would be rewarded by the 365 movement.[8]
According to the 365 movement the Swedish flag was "the ultimate symbol
of the nation state, the racist structure that puts up boundaries
between people".[9] In Malmö, the 365 movement staged a flag burning on national day evening where a hundred people attended.[10]

In Sweden, the message of an extreme left organization is usually not
isolated. Their call to burn the flags was spread to politicians like
Foujan Rouzbeh, parliamentary candidate for the Feminist Initiative, a
party that has a seat in the European Parliament. Rouzbeh wrote on
Twitter on national day in 2014:

"To desecrate the flag
tomorrow is to say that enough is enough now. Tear all the barriers,
smash all the walls. Down with the nation-state! Long live us"[11][12]

A letter to the editor of the Swedish union newspaper "Kollega" from
2015 asks: "Dare we now keep the Swedish flag on our walls without being
racist?"[13]This
is a question that more and more Swedes ask today because one incident
after another shows that the Swedish flag is being challenged by sectors
of the Swedish society. It is a legitimate question to ask because
putting the Swedish flag on the balcony of your residence has in
establishment and media circles become a symbol of xenophobia.[14]

"Long live us"!

As I write in The Era of the Drama Queens (Every Crisis Is a Triumph ), that, in a nutshell, is what leftist "opinions" and "talking points" boil down to…